January 7, 2020
I distinctly remember sitting in 12th grade English with a Penguin paperback copy of Hamlet open on my lap. As The Mousetrap scene played out, I marveled aloud: “This reads like an autobiography.” I briefly reflected on the Stratford story and just couldn’t square it all.
Given that vivid memory, you’d think I would have anticipated and welcomed the authorship debate. But for forty years I never heard of it, despite having read several editions of the complete works. I dismissed the first reference I encountered angrily, assuming it was part of the cancel culture.
Then I found Last Will. & Testament while searching for Shakespeare productions to stream on Amazon. The scholars and performers interviewed reasoned the case for Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, so thoughtfully — counterpoint to the unapologetically emotional responses from the Stratfordians — that I abandoned the Stratford view within 20 minutes. I’ve since read essays or books by most of those featured, as well as “Shakespeare” By Another Name and The Shakespeare Guide to Italy. Now I’m a zealous convert.
The case is further affirmed when I look through my own lens. My expertise is in customer profiling and authentication. I also have a degree and clinical experience in developmental psychology. Any reading — every reading — of the Stratford story now appears fraudulent and defies basic truths of human development. The Stratford man, by all evidence, was a stunted soul. He was litigious and usurious, and if he was literate, then he was also negligent with his children’s literacy. Absolutely nothing is known of him that suggests a capacity for the philosophical and emotional range lyricized by Shake-speare.
Shakespeare’s characters do not make casual, elementary references to their trades, customs, and countries. They don’t speak or behave with childish understanding. Instead, they are people of complex natures who, at times, are without self-knowledge and are motivated by the unknown as much as they are prescient and purposeful. To discern illustrative, meaningful details from among so many different environs and vocations requires extensive learning and experience. Shakespeare’s transcendent quality could not be achieved using chance details gleaned from encounters with strangers or common reading.
Not even an “innate genius” or prolific imagination achieves such resonance. Authenticity of people and place ring through every triumph and tragedy. That authenticity is the reality of a storied life. All that de Vere attained with his physical prowess, education, patronage, travel, and standing as a court favorite were not enough to save him from dynastic intrigues, moral and financial profligacy, or family turmoil. He failed in all of his vaunted personal ambitions. He ended a devastated man, ultimately surrendering everything — estates, social standing, and the canon itself. In the most superlative irony of all, the greatest literature in human history failed to achieve the goal for which it was apparently conceived — the continuation of the Tudor dynasty. De Vere died knowing that. It is his personal odyssey that courses through the works as lifeblood and finally makes sense of it all.
From this perspective, I find it extremely ironic that Oxfordians are accused of snobbery for adhering to an aristocratic author. De Vere’s life is proof that a man of any standing could be brought low by his own failings or the caprice of the state. He was hardly unique in being relegated to obscurity by a society where murder, torture, imprisonment, betrayal, siege, and seizure were currency as often spent as coin and privilege. It seems undeniable that the obfuscation of de Vere’s authorship was intentional. It’s hard to imagine how the Stratford lie could otherwise have lived so long.
— Karen Calderone
“How I Became an Oxfordian” is a series edited by Bob Meyers. You may submit your essay on this topic (500 words or less in an editable format such as MS Word), along with a digital photo of yourself, to: communications@shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org. Also include a sentence about yourself, e.g.: “John J. Smith is a businessman in San Francisco.” You must be an SOF member to submit an essay.
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